Design team:
Manuel Jiménez García, Christina Dahdaleh, Wei Chieh Shih
Robotic Manufacturing:
Alvaro Lopez, Vicente Soler, Seiichi Suzuki Erazo 
Project Suported by: Dezact, Modern Body Festival, The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL

 ‘Woven Memory’ is a medium scale light structure, constructed from digitally manipulating natural materials; bamboo. The inhabitable space is made by bundling together single elements as a method to create structural ecology. The bamboo pieces, provide a structure for stretching fabrics, which are covered with laser printed patterns. This project introduces new ways of computing flexible materials, creating a bending active structure, as well as utilising local natural materials such as bamboo.

Industrial robots are used to bend linear bamboo elements, and assemble these bent elements into a stable structure. This process is established through a workflow dictated by Softmodelling, a software created by Manuel Jimenez Garcia and ElasticSpace, a custom made application, which focuses on physical simulation of active bending structures,  designed and developed by Keiichi Suzuki. The robotic bending is controlled through the Grasshopper plugin “Robots”, developed by Vicente Soler (https://github.com/visose/Robots/wiki).  The modules are assembled in Taipei with the collaboration of students and participants of Space Media Festival 2016. 

The modular structure is constructed from 3m elements curated into the final piece. Each module is built from 30 flexible linear elements, which bundle together to create a light framework to house the ink impregnated fabrics. Its modular nature lends itself for easy assembly, disassembly and transportation. 

Patterns created by Wei Chieh Shih are projected onto the surface of the fabric pieces. The process; led by Wei Chieh Shih, reinterprets dark room photography techniques to impregnate the fabrics with ink, with the utilisation of lasers to expose the developing chemicals.
This research is sponsored by Dezact and Modern Body Festival in collaboration with The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL.

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